Biography

Tarik Chebli is a Franco-Algerian visual artist, born in 1993 in Nantes in France. He lives and works in Paris. He holds a Master’s degree in Fine Arts Research from the University of Rennes and develops a body of work dedicated entirely to nature. He has exhibited in Paris, Berlin, London, and in China, notably in Hangzhou and Shanghai. His work has gained recognition among international collectors, particularly in the Middle East.

He also completed a three-month artist residency in Huangshan in China, further deepening his engagement with the country’s artistic and cultural landscape.

Statement

I paint a fantasized, idealized vision of nature — one entirely free of human presence. For me, this nature is both a pictorial territory ripe for formal exploration and an ideological stance: a conscious refusal of anthropocentrism and the everyday. Inspired by my travels in Asia — particularly in China, Thailand, and Indonesia — as well as by wildlife documentaries, my practice is rooted in a fascinated observation of biodiversity and ecosystems.

Materiality lies at the heart of my work. I apply paint in large quantities, engaging with the surface in an almost tactile relationship. Nature becomes a pretext for a plastic exploration that verges on the sculptural. Through accumulation, thickness, and layering, the canvas transforms into a playground for recreating textures drawn from the living world — mud, bark, vegetation, fluids. Between these pictorial masses — liquid forms and dense impastos — I return to more controlled, detailed brushwork, where imagined flora and fauna emerge from a dreamlike world.

This tension between control and spontaneity, between detail and scale, allows me to construct a universe that is both realistic and nearly fantastical. I depict little-known birds and monkeys with astonishing colors and forms — creatures whose very existence seems to demand representation. What purpose do birds of paradise or the strange primates of tropical jungles serve, if not to be seen, painted, celebrated?

In a world saturated with human imagery, I choose to turn my gaze elsewhere — toward these sublime life forms, sometimes on the brink of extinction, which we may never come to truly know. In a constant movement between the contemplation of the natural world and the joy of material exploration, painting nature becomes both an aesthetic act and a gesture of resistance and remembrance.

By Andrea García Casal, Art Historian and Theorist

"Of course, ultimately, it is not even industrial accidents that should concern us most, [...] Rather, it is the uninterrupted, accident-free, and "normal" functioning of the fossil fuel-based economy that constitutes the true threat [...] The images offered by mainstream press [...] ha[ve] generated environmental problems from the beginning, including a carefully edited selection of visualities that reinforce the assumptions of the Anthropocene. How, then, would the visuality of a culture opposed to the Anthropocene appear?"

*Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today. T. J. Demos. 2017. Own translation.*

The art historian T. J. Demos, who specializes in environmental and political questions, seeks to counter the Anthropocene through the analysis of artistic practice that denounces the destruction of nature. In his 2017 essay, he emphasizes this, while also revealing the mechanisms that articulate the functioning of the Anthropocene. It should be clarified that the Anthropocene is not a geological era from a scientific perspective, but rather serves to define the present moment of Earth, always from our perspective; a planet that evidently survives as an astrophysical entity, but within which environmental degradation is detected that affects all its living beings, with its origin lying in humanity—*ánthrōpos*, human being.

The theorist analyzes the key notion of visuality opposed to the Anthropocene: how a branch of contemporary art articulates itself in an attempt to provoke a rupture of the anthropocentric system, ultimately capitalist, by confronting the visual-media legitimation carried out by this system through subordinate press.

The painting of Tarik Chebli (Nantes, 1993) is framed within art that champions ecological activism, although it does so in a subtle manner, without diminishing its power. He claims the necessity of acting in the face of the devastation of nature, delving into the beauty of life on the planet in the absence of the human presence. Therefore, in his figurative compositions he deliberately suppresses humanity; its existence remains absent.

Thus, Chebli presents exuberant landscapes, whether terrestrial—the most frequent—or aquatic—representing marine depths. In these untamed environments he shows us profuse fauna and flora, in a postimpressionist style. The chromaticity is typically cool, inspired by blue skies, the greenish tonalities of plants, and the mass of seawater reflecting the celestial vault. Warm touches concentrate on some zoomorphic and plant motifs, highlighting their presence. The use of texture is crucial in our protagonist, for through this resource he achieves showing the material quality of his works, providing an illusion of volume and especially of mass that makes each artistic piece more realistic and expressive. He usually plays with areas and motifs that are highly textured, with great haptic capacity, dense both in the quantity of material employed and visually, which contrast with others of great lightness. Yet his paintings concatenate an important thickness of paint layers in general, and although there are areas with less pigment, the corpulence manifested remains significant.

In connection with this, the author clarifies that, on occasions, he may begin works of art and then leave them at rest until encountering them some time later and being able to finish them comfortably. Therefore, he does not rush the completion of his paintings; he prefers to create them gradually and to find himself completely satisfied with the final result. This gives rise on the surface of the pieces to a peculiar texture born from the mixture of past pictorial strata with others more current, registering, thanks to the layers of paint, the entire process that leads to the achievement of the work of art. From a conceptual viewpoint, Chebli registers each instant of his conception of the piece, making it evident, making an analogy with a living organism that grows, evolves. It also recalls strata—that is, the horizontal layers investigated by geology and archaeology, in which one digs deeper to discover different levels of the past. The strata situated lower down are the most ancient; they allude to the first pictorial strokes that the author reflects in his progress with the artistic work.

The vividness of these compositions, representing creatures that come from contexts, mostly Asian—highlighting Southeast Asia, which is ravaged by deforestation, in addition to industrial pollution—are a call to reflection. Chebli reminds us through his art of a crucial reasoning: "The last man, the last woman, and the last child could disappear from the face of the Earth without any significant harmful consequence for the well-being of wild animals and plants. On the contrary, many of them would be greatly benefited: the destruction of their habitats due to human 'developments' would cease; the poisoning and contamination of their environment would come to an end;" (Paul W. Taylor, *The Ethics of Respect for Nature*, 1986). Therefore, he follows the thought of philosopher Paul W. Taylor and warns that our absence can even improve the life of the rest of the planet. His compositions are a sort of uchronic stages, in which the human being is not represented because it does not even exist. With his lush landscapes and thick marine bottoms, nourished with vitality, Edenic, in synthesis, Chebli works in the artistic line that combats the Anthropocene and the environmental damage it generates. He confronts the visuality shown by major media outlets and also by all those corrupt organisms that seek to legalize bad practices against nature, conceived by humanity, recalling Demos's analysis.